“Run it by me one more time,” he said to the curtain-snapper. He knew he’d seen the guy before. He didn’t wear scrubs or a lab coat. More a T-shirt and jeans kind of chap. Ponytail. Name tag “Kadar.” Rhymed with “radar.” Right now Kadar had an uncertain look on his face, which for him was unusual. He wasn’t sure he understood Laks’s question.
So Laks clarified: “Something happened to my brain.”
The guy exhaled. As if to say How many times are we going to have to go over this? He broke eye contact. His gaze wandered over to a counter in one corner of the room where a microwave and a coffee maker had been provided for the use of Laks and the many people who came to his suite to have these weird conversations with him. Beneath the counter was a small fridge, and atop it were a fruit plate and a basket of snacks. A thought occurred to Kadar and he strode over to it.
Meanwhile Dr. Banerjee was saying, “You suffered an exposure to a pattern of energy that coupled in a deleterious manner to certain delicate structures inside of your noggin.”
“Consider a spherical brain,” said Kadar. He had plucked a single green grape from a bunch of them on the fruit plate. He now extracted a steak knife from the silverware drawer and used it to cut most, but not all, of the way through the grape. Laks drifted over to watch. Kadar opened the grape like a book. The uncut skin in the back held the two halves of it together like a hinge. “To most people, a piece of fruit not quite cut in half. To a radio engineer, a butterfly antenna.”
“Antenna!?”
Kadar nodded solemnly and placed the grape in the microwave. He slammed the appliance’s door shut and poised a finger over the “Beverage” button. “The last thing you saw before you lost consciousness on the top of that ridge was a Chinese weapons system that projects electromagnetic energy in a certain band. A little bit like this microwave oven.” He hit the button while indicating with his other hand that Laks should observe. Laks bent over and peered through the perforated-metal screen behind the door glass to see the grape dimly visible trundling around on the glass turntable and presumably getting warmer. But suddenly there was a flash like a little lightning bolt and a sizzling noise. Kadar shut off the microwave, opened the door, and pulled out the two halves of the grape, which were no longer attached. “Hardly even warm,” he said. He rotated the halves so that Laks could see the former place of attachment, now marked with tiny black smudges where the skin had explosively vaporized. “But in that one place, for a moment, it was as hot as the surface of the sun.”
“How do you know that?”
“The color of the flash.” Kadar held out the grape halves. Laks let them tumble into the palm of his hand. They were scarcely above body heat. “And that is the problem. The radiation from the Chinese weapon coupled weakly to most of your body but strongly to certain bits. Which got damaged. We’re trying to get those bits to grow back—or provide substitutes where that isn’t going to be possible.”
Laks looked over at Dr. Banerjee, who seemed mortified. Presumably she felt that Kadar was being a bit blunt. But Laks didn’t mind. “I’ll keep the grape next to my bed as a reminder,” he said. “So I don’t have to keep asking you.”
Kadar seemed slightly abashed. “I don’t mean to suggest in any way that we are unwilling to answer any and all of your questions.”
“In that case, I have one more.”
“Shoot.”
“Why go to all this trouble just for me?” Laks looked around. “I mean . . . this is a pretty nice hospital room, right?”
“Very nice,” said Dr. Banerjee, with a depth of feeling suggesting that she had, in her day, seen some pretty fucked-up hospitals.
“It’s because you are a hero of India,” Kadar said, “but India is not quite finished with you yet.”
The Beaver
From the river IJ—the water in the heart of Amsterdam—to the Lagoon of Venice was beyond the Beaver’s range. So the former queen stopped off at Lake Como to refuel, to pee, to get a cup of coffee, and to drop off her co-pilot. She would fly the last leg solo. Partly that was for the visuals. Whenever there were two people in the cockpit, cynics assumed that Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia was just faking it.
But also she needed some alone time. She had abdicated the throne and seen Lotte become the new queen first thing in the morning. Since then she’d hardly had a moment to herself; and those moments had been interrupted by texts from Lotte asking her mother for advice and for reassurance.
She answered a couple of the more urgent questions while sipping her coffee beneath an awning by the water. Nobility and royalty had been coming to Lake Como since Roman times, often to lick their wounds after some kind of reversal in their fortunes. So its shores were strewn with spectacular old buildings with long, complicated, and not especially cheerful histories. Saskia could have found family connections to many of these, should she care to go rooting around in her ancestral tree. So having that cup of coffee, there in the dockside café of a luxury hotel that had once been the private villa of some great-great-uncle thrice removed, was a reminder that, if she so chose, she could while away the rest of her life in such a place. Just like many other defrocked, deposed, defunct, or disgraced persons of former importance down through the ages. To some that might be an irresistible siren’s call, but it made Saskia’s skin crawl. She couldn’t finish that coffee fast enough. She had a sort of vision, sitting there enjoying the temperate breeze off the lake, that if the climate apocalypse happened, this place would be the last bastion to fall. And having now given up her throne in the pursuit of the climate wars, she didn’t want to hole up in the last bastion. She wanted to go down fighting in the front lines.
So she stood up and tossed back the dregs of her coffee as soon as the lads down on the fuel dock were finished. She texted “OMW” to her contact in Venice, then shut off her phone. Under the lidless eyes of several paparazzi drones she marched down to the dock, climbed aboard her seaplane, and began to work her way down the pre-flight checklist. A few minutes later she was in the air, bound south down the Y-shaped mountain valley that clasped the lake. The plain of Lombardy then unfolded below her and she swung east toward the Adriatic, some two hundred and fifty kilometers away—an hour’s flying time in this lumbering old pontoon plane. You could get faster, fancier ones, but this was a Canadian classic: a De Havilland Beaver. Her family had warm connections to Canada, going back to the war, and so this was the one she had picked out.
Once she had got the Beaver trimmed in level flight and headed in the right direction she spent ten minutes crying. Not that she was particularly sad. It was just that during important transitions you had to get this out of your system, and she hadn’t performed that task yet. The Dutch didn’t do formal coronations and so Lotte had become the new queen in a basically secular ceremony in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk, which was a church only in name. No crown had been placed on her head. They didn’t even have a crown. In attendance had been everyone who mattered in the Netherlands as well as a smattering of foreign royalty and international diplomats. Very convenient for Saskia who’d been able to exchange pleasantries with, and say goodbye to, many people in very little time. But when you had abdicated, you needed to get out of the country. To make a clean break and clear the stage for your successor. So after a quick change of clothes in the adjoining Royal Palace—as of ten minutes ago, her daughter’s official Amsterdam residence—Saskia had walked down to the IJ, jostling and dodging through pedestrian traffic like a private citizen, and climbed into the waiting plane and simply flown away.